The present invention relates to telecommunications systems such as telephone networks comprising a plurality of interconnected telephone exchanges and communication therebetween.
Conventional telephone networks are fully-meshed in that each trunk exchange has a direct connection to every other trunk exchange. Traffic levels in telephone networks are increasing, leading to a continued need to increase the capacity of such networks. To achieve this, exchanges need to be enlarged and new exchanges installed. In fully-meshed networks, a significant number of additional network interconnections are needed with each new exchange, leading to further increases in the number of ports needed per exchange. This results in less efficient networks with costs per unit of traffic increasing.